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What’s up with NYT’s “Blog”runner?

I just took a first look at Blogrunner, to see what it does differently than TechMeme or TechWatching. Hmmm. Was it always like this? Or has it changed since the NYT bought it?

Here’s a snap from the Blogrunner landing page:

Here’s a list of the above-the-fold links on that page:

BBC News
BarackObama.com
The NYT
The NYT again
The Washington Post
The Financial Times
AP
The NYT yet again

Hmmmmmm. Doesn’t seem very blog-y. Scrolling down below the fold, there’s a long, narrow list of content composed of individual stories. Of the 33 listed when I stopped by…

1. 7 were from the NYT.
2. 19 were from what I would consider to be MSM news sources (WSJ, CNN, Forbes, LATimes, newswires, etc.) - that’s 58%

Blogrunner certainly has blog content - you just need to dig through a layer of MSM window dressing to get to it. Anyway, it seems odd to me that a service that proclaims blog-centric aggregation is dominated by MSM news sources.

One behavioural element that I’ve noticed in working on the TechWatching algorithm is that MSM sources will dominate a content pool - say what you will about blogging, the MSM still leads most “breaking” stories, and as such, bloggers will point to MSM outlets. A link analysis engine will then float the MSM new sources to the top of the “most relevant” pile - creating a presentation like what we see on Blogrunner, or what often happens on Techmeme. (Note: I’m not saying that’s how those sites work, but I can see how link-watching algorithms could create a page like that on any aggregator).

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